Sunday

Dec 23, 2018 at 2:02 AM

If you were shopping for a used car on the Auto Mile in Norwood a couple of weeks ago, you might have found yourself at the local CarMax dealership checking out a 2010 Honda Fit. If you were in the market for a small hatchback, this one might have checked all the boxes: good gas mileage, power windows and power locks, with just 70,000 miles on the odometer - all for less than $11,000.

But the Fit also came with another, much less desirable feature: a defective airbag device with the potential to rupture on inflation, potentially shooting high velocity metal fragments into the passenger compartment.

Further down the lot, you might have looked at a bright red 2010 Nissan Versa. Another compact hatchback, this vehicle came with similar trimmings, and another unwanted feature of its own: defective front coil springs that can corrode when exposed to winter road salt and eventually fracture, jamming into the front tires.

Incredibly, Massachusetts car dealers are selling used vehicles with known, dangerous defects that are currently under a safety recall – and it is not just a couple cars at a single dealership. Last year, MASSPIRG published a report finding that one in four vehicles for sale at six different CarMax locations, including four stores in Massachusetts, was subject to an active safety recall. Among them were vehicles with defective parts that could spontaneously catch fire or shut off the engine while driving, and seat belts that could stop working in a crash.

These defects have had deadly consequences. A defective ignition switch found in millions of General Motors vehicles has been linked to at least 124 deaths. Defective Takata airbag inflators like the one in the Honda Fit have been linked to at least 23 deaths and over 230 injuries, including blindness.

Common sense dictates that dealers should not be able to sell cars with known, unrepaired safety recalls. Federal law prohibits the sale of other consumer goods with safety recalls even at a yard sale or thrift shop. The Obama Administration had been moving toward a federal ban on selling used cars with unrepaired safety recalls. That progress stopped under President Trump. The nation’s largest car dealership chain, AutoNation, even reversed its prior commitment not to sell unrepaired recalled used cars, its CEO explaining that “with the Trump administration there's no way that that issue is going to be addressed from a regulatory point of view."

Yet while the federal government has failed to protect consumers, that doesn’t mean we’re out of options. Longstanding Massachusetts Attorney General regulations require car dealers to warrant that the cars they are selling are “fit to be driven safely”, and Massachusetts law prohibits deceptive practices like advertising vehicles as having passed a rigorous inspection when they have safety recalls that have not been repaired. Consumers in Massachusetts and states with similar laws have sued over being sold defective recalled vehicles and won confidential settlements. However, forced arbitration limits many consumers’ ability to address these abuses themselves.

Here in Massachusetts, we’re lucky that Attorney General Maura Healey has a record of stepping up for consumers harmed by abuses in the sale or financing of cars, including by going after car dealers that lied to customers, or sold unsafe or inoperable vehicles. By putting the brakes on the sale of dangerous recalled vehicles, she can make Massachusetts a national leader in ensuring that vehicles on car lots are safe – and stop a dangerous practice before it leads to tragedy.

Deirdre Cummings is the legislative director of MASSPIRG, a statewide nonprofit, non- partisan consumer advocacy organization. John W. Van Alst is an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center and directs the Working Cars for Working Families project.